#Americacentrist

[msfbgraves]

Dear @re-dracula,

Thank you for your amazing and detailed podcast that gives so many of us hours of joy. Thank you for the exquisite casting, the trigger warnings, the background information, the sound design, the Tumblr book club. You made an exquisite piece of work.

Which is why I, as a Dutch person with a love of continental Europe, am so heartbroken. Why did none of the producers check the accent of the actor you've cast for Van Helsing with a Dutch person? Or a Belgian person? Or a student of the Dutch language?

"Harlem" is a burrough of NYC. Haarlem is a city in The Netherlands, yet he used the American pronounciation. "Van" in "van der" P - I can't even make out what that name is supposed to be - is never stressed, that's an American custom. Are you trying to imply that Van Helsing - again Jack Seward's pronounciation is better than the professor's!- is a con man from Scandinavia? How would you feel if they gave Quincey Morris a Kiwi accent? Why do you seemingly care so much about representation of certain non Americans, but not for others? Why are you so spot on with the British cast, but so careless with your Dutch main character? Maybe Sister Agatha's accent is also wildly off the mark, I couldn't say. But why was the casting, the due diligence, so uneven? Are Brits and Americans more important to you as an audience? Will caring about other kinds of misrepresentation or sensitivities make you look better to the Anglocentric world?

I do not blame the actor for lacking the accent skills needed for this part, but I do blame the otherwise excellent production, for it makes you look hypocritical in your effort to be inclusive. It makes you look horribly biased and pandering to a very specific American and maybe British demographic. It makes me feel that you think some people are rather less equal than others and it makes you look neo colonialist.

So why this lapse, re-dracula? Because you cannot only be pandering to English speaking progressives for woke brownie points. What's going on here?

Sincerely, a Dutch fan.

[dasha-aibo]

No offense but you saying "I'm not an edgelord who screams ESS JAY DUBYA when I see a black guy or a woman in a titular role" is kind of false, from my outsider's perspective? Like when you went off on the posters for that Nutcracker film for having non-white actors, for example, seemed pretty in line with what you claim not to be. Just thought I'd say so, cause YouTube is all about outsider perception, not trying to be rude or something...

I didn’t yell at it for featuring black people, I pointed an uncomfortable double standard that it’s okay to put black people in “white” stories, but don’t you dare do the same with PoC stories.

I don’t give a shit about racial representation in media, it’s absolutely meaningless.

BUT.

I give a shit about Americacentrist views on race and double standards.

Those are very different things.

[dasha-aibo]

@rametarin

Nobody is blaming POCs, we're blaming Americacentrist academia and views on race, many racial academics are white.

maybe we'll have some American actors, who claim they're Polish, or some other Slav ethnicity, probably all deciding on Russian, since that's the only one they "know" something about, because their great^15-grandpa, or ma, made a Pelmeni once.

Business as usual. They only care about someone erasing ethnicities if said ethnicities are not white.